Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

There isn’t a single person, left or right, who follows health policy seriously who disagrees with the assertion that Romneycare was the model for Obamacare. And Massachusetts has had to raise taxes, after Romney left office, to pay for the law’s significant cost overruns.

Here are some examples, left and right. But Roy o-mits a few important points.

Mitt Romney increased taxes the moment he signed RomneyCare. RomneyCare increased net government spending. That in itself is an increase in the tax burden. All that remains to be determined is who will pay for that added spending and when they will pay it. The fact that the incidence of that added tax burden fell after Romney left office does not mean that’s when the added tax burden was created.

Mitt Romney has raised taxes on as many people as Barack Obama has. Half of RomneyCare’s new spending was financed by the federal government through the Medicaid program, which is financed through federal taxes, which fall on taxpayers in all 50 states. That means that when Romney financed half of RomneyCare’s new spending by pulling down more federal Medicaid dollars, he increased taxes on residents of all 50 states.

RomneyCare was born of, and expanded, a corrupt scheme by Massachusetts politicians to tax residents of all 50 states. What motivated Romney to enact RomneyCare, as former Romney/Obama adviser Jonathan Gruber explains here, was the widespread desire (within Massachusetts) to hang on to $385 million of federal Medicaid money that Massachusetts had secured using one of Medicaid’s notorious and fraudulent “provider tax” scams. In other words, the whole purpose of RomneyCare was to enable Massachusetts to hold on to $385 million that it received by defrauding and taxing residents of other states. And of course, Romney/RomneyCare caused the tax burden that Massachusetts effectively imposes on non-Massachusetts residents to grow.

Christie is so laughably wrong about RomneyCare that one cannot help but smile that his remarks came during the same news cycle as this:

Newly obtained White House records… show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006…One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.

“The White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts,” said Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the Romney administration on health care and who attended five meetings at the Obama White House in 2009, including the meeting with the president. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model”…

Romney said the people involved in the White House meetings were “consultants,” not “aides”…

[Gruber said,] “If Mitt Romney had not stood up for this reform in Massachusetts … I don’t think it would have happened nationally. So I think he really is the guy with whom it all starts.”

All of which is pretty much what my colleague/boss David Boaz and I have been saying since April 2010 in this well-worn Cato video:

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney announces today that he will be a candidate for president. His announcement is expected to tout his business experience and to portray him as the candidate best able to deal with the country’s economic problems. But one thing you are not likely to hear him talk about is his Massachusetts health plan, Romneycare.

Of course, Romney has already tried to put this issue away with a speech in Detroit last month, and he would probably be happy to never talk about it again. But if Romney really believes he can hide from the Romneycare fallout, he is badly mistaken.

Cato scholars have issued several reports detailing the many failings of Romneycare. Those studies can be found here , here , here and here for instance.

In his Detroit speech, Romney trotted out three defenses. First, he says that his plan, unlike Obamacare, did not increase taxes. That is technically true — if you consider only the legislation as Romney signed it. However, it is also true that the legislation relied heavily on federal subsidies — more than $300 million — and was still underfunded. Romney’s successor was forced both to cut back on some benefits that the plan originally offered and to raise the state’s cigarette tax by $1 per pack ($154 million annually) to help pay for the program. The state also imposed approximately $89 million in fees and assessments on health-care providers and insurers.

Similarly, Romney claims that his plan only costs about one percent of the Massachusetts budget and is, therefore, not a budget-busting, big government program. In making this claim, however, Romney fails to note that that accounting does not take into account more than $300 million annually in federal funds. Nor does it count the costs that were pushed off onto Massachusetts businesses and taxpayers through the individual and employer mandates, or the costs of increased insurance premiums.

And, finally, Romney criticizes Obamacare as a “one size fits all” federal plan, whereas his plan was implemented in only one state. That’s true. Governor Romney only messed up the health-care system in Massachusetts, while President Obama has messed up health care for the entire country. Of course, as governor, Romney didn’t have the power to impose his model outside of his state. He now says that he opposes any national plan, calling for states to experiment with different approaches as the “laboratories of democracy.” That would certainly be an improvement over Obamacare. On the other hand, he has repeatedly said that he sees the Massachusetts plan as a model for the nation and has urged other states to copy his approach.

Governor Romney faces many challenges in convincing voters that he really does want to reduce the size, cost, and intrusiveness of government. For example, Romney has recently been pandering to Iowa voters by renewing his support for ethanol subsidies. On other issues, he has been a big supporter of federal involvement in education. He backed No Child Left Behind and once called for the federal government to buy a laptop computer for every child born in America. His record as Massachusetts governor was decidedly mixed. In the Cato Institute’s biannual ranking of governors on fiscal issues, Romney received a grade of only “C.” His philosophy of governing can be seen from his comment, “I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t always ask for federal money whenever I got the chance.”

But the biggest single obstacle to his candidacy remains Romneycare. Unless and until he finds a way to deal with this albatross, he will be a weak and wounded frontrunner.

Next up for marriage equality: Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Please join us at 12:00 p.m. Eastern today as co-counsels for the plaintiffs Theodore Olson and John Boies join Center for American Progress president John Podesta and Cato chairman Robert A. Levy for a panel discussion on marriage equality, exploring legal and moral questions dating back to the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that ended state bans on interracial marriage. If you cannot join us here at Cato, please tune in to watch a live stream of the event.

“Republicans have an opportunity for a much more important debate, which will frame the election campaign next year.”

In President Obama’s next speech, Cato director of foreign policy studies Christopher Preble hopes “that the president reaffirms the importance of peaceful regime change from within, not American-sponsored regime change from without.”

What will former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s next position on health care be?

As the number of events I’ve participated in as a result of my challenge to debate “anyone, anywhere, any time” on the constitutionality of Obamacare approaches 50, I find myself in many interesting situations. This past Tuesday was no exception, as George Mason law professor (and Cato adjunct scholar) Ilya Somin and I took on Yale law professor Akhil Amar and NYU law professor Rick Hills in an Oxford-style parliamentary debate organized by the Amherst College Political Union.

I think Somin and I acquitted ourselves rather well, especially given that the audience was hardly a sympathetic one. I’ll reserve other comment, however, because you can view video of the debate here:

Postscript: After the debate, Amar and I made a $100 bet that our respective sides would prevail at the Supreme Court.

That’s the title of my latest column at National Review Online. An excerpt:

Mitt Romney isn’t the only Republican presidential hopeful with an Obamacare problem: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, were he to become the GOP’s nominee, could also undermine the repeal campaign that has united the party’s base and independent voters.

Among his liabilities:

Daniels’s decision to accept Obamacare funds and move forward with implementation is further undermining the repeal effort. Yesterday, federal judge Roger Vinson reversed his initial order forbidding the Obama administration to implement the law. He did so in part because plaintiff states such as Indiana are implementing it, which he said “undercut” their own argument that he should block it.

But all is not lost for Daniels.

Daniels can spare himself and the repeal movement such setbacks by following the lead of Florida governor Rick Scott (R.) and Alaska governor Sean Parnell (R.) and flatly refusing to implement any aspect of Obamacare. Daniels could even organize another letter in which his fellow governors all make the same announcement.

You know you’re really wrong when Mike Huckabee can call you out. But that’s the situation Mitt Romney finds himself in, as Michael Cannon points out below. Huckabee says Romney’s government-run health care plan with an individual mandate is a bad idea, Romney says he’s still proud of his plan, which is totally different from President Obama’s government-run health care plan with an individual mandate. But really, what can he do? In 17 years of seeking high political office, he is known for two things: changing his position on a surprisingly large number of issues, and his Massachusetts health care program. Which was of course the forerunner of Obamacare, as Michael Cannon and I pointed out in the video that Michael linked. So Romney is still defending a position I think we’ve already refuted.

Meanwhile, in speeches and interviews this week, Mike Huckabee continues to make the untenable connection between gay marriage and family breakdown that I discussed two weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times. Huckabee told reporters:

Huckabee opposes gay marriage on the grounds that, according to him, it destroys traditional families.

“There is a quantified impact of broken families,” Huckabee said. “[There is a] $300 billion dad deficit in America every year…that’s the amount of money that we spend as taxpayers to pick up the pieces because dads are derelict in their duties.”

One thing gay couples are not doing is filling the world with fatherless children. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that allowing more people to make the emotional and financial commitments of marriage could cause family breakdown or welfare spending….

Social conservatives point to a real problem and then offer phony solutions.

But you won’t find your keys on the thoroughfare if you dropped them in the alley, and you won’t reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and preventing them from adopting orphans.

One might add that, as Huckabee knows very well, rates of divorce and unwed motherhood soared decades before anyone started agitating for gay marriage.

If Huckabee and Romney are the Republican frontrunners, President Obama must be sleeping well these days.

In 2006, then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) fought for and enacted a health care law now known as RomneyCare – though the law is so nearly identical to ObamaCare that one could call it ObamaCare 1.0. Romney is seeking the GOP nomination for president in 2012. But since 84 percent of Republicans want ObamaCare repealed, the fact that he paved the way for ObamaCare is causing problems for Romney among the party faithful. The most recent manifestation came in the form of a tongue-lashing from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R), whose book criticizes Romney both for enacting RomneyCare and for refusing to admit it was mistake. In a recent interview, Huckabee said:

The position he should take is to say: “Look, the reason Obamacare won’t work is because we’ve tried it at the state level and we know it won’t work.”

“Mitt Romney is proud of what he accomplished for Massachusetts in getting everyone covered,” Romney’s spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, told the Boston Globe, in the first direct response Team Mitt made to Huckabee’s criticism of the health plan in his new book.

Fehrnstrom added the usual stuff about how, even though Romney is proud of what RomneyCare/ObamaCare has done for Massachusetts, RomneyCare/ObamaCare may not be right for the entire nation. As David Boaz and I explain in this Cato video, to which Romney has lent enduring relevance, Romney can’t have it both ways:

It’s as if the guy has just awakened from a 20-year nap and doesn’t realize the world has changed.